6 comments to Do you have a Squidoo lens?

Hi Alyson, I have a Squidoo Lens but mostly for the benefits of search engine optimization. A Squidoo Lens contains links to top ranking sites that we can post content to for free and have it point back to our Squidoo Lense then over to our main website. It helps to get our name in places that we might not otherwise think about also. For instance I can post a video of myself working on a painting on U-Tube with a link back to my Squidoo Lens and website. I not only have an inbound link on my Squidoo lense which search engines look for, I have an inbound link for a new audience on U-Tube to see and use that I hadn’t thought about. Squidoo compiled many of these links all on one page, neatly organized, with a focused content specifically geared to ME. A ME focused page, with higher rankings than my website alone. How wonderful. A popular ME. Well in the search engine eye anyhow. Also I love the fact that Squidoo RSS feeds my blog content to my Squidoo Lens. My blog content is automatically in two places at once without me doing a thing. Art has no words for search engines to look at, which makes my blog words more valuable for Search Engine Optization. In my opinion a Squidoo Lense is a valuable marketing tool to take advantage of.

Hi Alyson, I also have a Squidoo Lens, my lens was created in order to try to create a resource for and about Australian coloured pencil artists in Australia. Particularly in regards to purchasing coloured pencil supplies online and locally (so we don’t have to pay extraordinary amounts for shipping), and also to highlight Australian artists who are using coloured pencils in finished artworks in order to try to get some awareness and recognition of this medium here. I know Katherine and her fabulous lens, I in no way wanted to compete with that fabulous resource, I simiply wanted to provide “additional” local information to those who were searching as i was. I have also found it valuable in terms of marketing as i do get more visitors to my blog and website from my lens. http://www.squidoo.com/auscolouredpencils

I have a lens for art quilts that I created a few years ago. I don’t pay much attention to it anymore – for a while I was putting effort into it and it even hit the top 100 list (course that was back in the early days of squidoo – much less competition). I still get some traffic from squidoo to my site but not enough to really notice. Back when I kept the squidoo site up to date I got more.

I have a lens for my ketubah-related business. But while I get some traffic from it, I have yet to get the right kind of traffic — real art buyers. There are just so many of these kinds of “traffic builders” out there, that take a lot of work but rarely seem to pull anything in.

Jennifer and Belinda: Thank you for sharing. I’d love to know how much of your traffic is coming from those Squidoo links. Do you follow that? Lisa and Daniel: Good to know. I absolutely love the idea of creating a lens, but need to be reassured of the benefits before spending time on it.

There is no question that if you create AND maintain a squidoo lens then it will reward you with traffic. Creation alone will only provide a temporary blip to the stats. It works a bit like Google – you need to feed your lens with fresh content for it to maintain ranking! Some tips if you’re thinking of developing a squidoo lens. 1) Don’t cram everything into one lens all at once. (If I started over I think I might have more lenses with less content on each). 2) Drip feed a lens. New content registers and then boosts ranking. Good content is what gets you visitors and recommendations. 3) Being part of a squidoo group helps your lens to be more visible. See if there are any other people with a similar interest. For example, there’s a group of print-making lenses which are beginning to take off. 4) Look at other lenses and work out what design tricks seem to work well.